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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward theme instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.